In this episode of Truth About FX, Walter gives points on taking down barriers that hinders you from becoming a successful trader. He suggests some handy tools on how to take down these psychological walls, the importance of identifying your beliefs, and how your perception of others can affect your decisions.
Download (Duration: 07:05 / 8.11 MB)
In This Episode:
00:55 -a “male thing”
01:32 – the best advice
02:34 – barriers to overcome
03:09 – the gold standard
04:43 – what drives our actions
05:44 – biggest help for trading
06:41 – bubbling up
Tweetables:
What are the barriers that are stopping you? [Click To Tweet].
Watch other people and pay attention to what you say. [Click To Tweet].
The drivers for our actions are our subconscious beliefs. [Click To Tweet].
Announcer: Sometimes, forex trading is a wild and wooly place to be. That’s why Hugh is here, to post your questions to Walter, the naked forex guy. Hugh’s got questions and Walter’s got the answers. Here at the Truth About FX Podcast.
Hugh: Hi, Walter! Here is another question for you. I’ve come to realize that I need to work on my mindset more than my trading method. Where do you recommend I start?
Walter: This is a tough one. First of all, most traders have something along this line. Most traders are dealing with something like this and so, there’s two ways to approach it. One is to just say “I need to find out what is going on and I need to fix it” which is like typically a male thing.
Something is wrong with the car, I will figure it out, fix it. Something is wrong with the clock, I will fix it. That sort of thing.
The other way is to say “You know what? Does not really matter what’s wrong, I am just going to replace the underlying beliefs that are restricting me from, that are holding me back. These barriers to success, I am just going to overwrite those subconscious thoughts with something more profitable and more positive”.
So, there is really two ways to approach it. If you are one of those people that feels like you just have to know what is going on, then there’s a lot of things that you can do. The best advice I ever received going through school — and I went three degrees in psychology all the way up to PhD.
The best advice I had was this professor who said “You want to know, you want to do some free therapy. You want to do something that’s like it’s going to tell you sort of what is going on in your head? This is what you do: you sit down on a bench in a public spot — you can do this at the mall — sit down in a mall and you just watch the people walking by and listen to what you say to yourself. ‘He’s an idiot’, ‘she’s too fat’, or ‘what a jerk’”.
You know what I mean? And so, what was happening is you are projecting the things that you do not like about yourself onto other people. Pay particular attention to what you say when you see someone who is clearly wealthy. What’s happening is you are going to project what you think about wealthy people onto those people walking by.
That helps you to see what are your barriers to overcome. You have to overcome these barriers. What are these barriers that are stopping you from achieving your trading success? That’s one way to approach it.
If you really want to know these, there are other ways, like you can get into hypnosis, you can go to therapy and you can go to a dream analysis. There are a lot of ways to dig in there to pull out your subconscious thoughts but I think that is the simplest, easiest and certainly the cheapest way to do it is to simply watch other people and pay attention to what you say.
In particular, pay attention to other people who are clearly successful, or rich or wealthy, whatever you see as the gold standard as a trader. Obviously, when you see someone wealthy, you do not know how they made the wealth but you do know what you think about them. That is what you want to dig into.
The last thing I would say is that is identifying that and then to overwrite those beliefs. You can use hypnosis, you can use subliminal CDs, you can use lots of different things. We’ll put some links in the shownotes below this podcast so that you can find some resources along those lines.
That is, basically, how I suggest most traders approach it because we all do have subconscious thoughts that are affecting us. Some people might be sitting there thinking “You know what, Walter, that is a bunch of hooey. I don’t believe that. I do not believe that the subconscious really directs your activities.”
This is what I would say to that, we have very good data from functional MRI machines, which are basically mapping your brain as you are thinking and making decisions. We know from this functional MRI data that the person… They hook you up to one of this machines, somebody is sitting over there on the other room and they are asking you to make some decisions say, buy the EUR or sell the EUR or whatever. You have to push the button that says “buy” or push the button that says “sell”.
The person in the other room is watching your brain imaging on the functional MRI. That person knows six seconds before you make the decision what your decision is going to be. You have to think about that for a second. How is it that what you are going to do is clearly identified long before you do it?
The answer, of course, is that the drivers for our actions are really our subconscious beliefs. And so, it’s only later that we actually act on those beliefs in the form of an action and then later on we’ll talk about why we did it and make up reasons for that.
I know that this is a long way to answer but I just want to suggest to you, find out — if this is an issue for you, if you have identified that this is your issue. By the way, this is, I believe, almost everyone’s issue including myself because it is something lifelong thing you really have to work at this.
If you think this is what is going on with you, I think you should first decide whether you need to know what your beliefs are. If so, you can dig into those and we’ve delineated that. And then two, define how you can implant better, more profitable, more successful, more positive beliefs in your subconscious.
Are you going to use hypnosis, or subliminal messaging or you’re going to see a therapist, what can you do to change that because that is going to be the biggest help for your trading. So, hopefully that makes sense. I would be interested in hearing what you think about this.
Hugh: I do not know if I am too qualified to talk about this but it is something that I am definitely going through right now. I really do like that part where you exercise though because I catch myself doing that sometimes and then when I really back it out, it pretty comes down to what I am thinking about myself. I really appreciate that.
Walter: It’s so true. We all do it, Hugh. It is just one of those things that it’s better if you know what you are doing because you can work on it. You are right, I catch myself doing it. We all do it where we sort of project what we think about ourselves and what we think about certain… Like, if you see someone who is homeless, what do you say when you walk by to someone who is homeless?
Do you say to yourself “Oh, that poor guy. Should I give him some money?” Or, do you say “What a leech on society?” These things are all bubbling up and they happen when you see wealthy people too. Those are the things that are really going to stop you from achieving what you want in trading.
It is an important thing for all of us to be aware of. It’s a great question. Thanks for the question.
Hugh: Sure! Thank you for the answer and we’ll see you next time.
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